TRENTON – Gov. Chris Christie's chief of staff might be New Jersey's next attorney general – but that appointment now hinges on whether lawmakers can be satisfied by his response to the George Washington Bridge lane-closure controversy.

Toward that end, Kevin O'Dowd testified for roughly seven hours Monday before an often skeptical panel of lawmakers who wondered why he and others in Christie's office didn't respond more quickly in an effort to discover what happened last September in Fort Lee.

"What amazes me, and I find somewhat appalling, though this whole process is the absolute lack of curiosity of why this was done," said Assembly Majority Leader Louis Greenwald, D-Camden, who said Christie's office then "went into hypergear" months later only to limit the political damage.

O'Dowd said he trusted former deputy chief of staff Bridget Anne Kelly and took at face value her clear insistence she didn't participate in the closures.

"Bridget Kelly is someone that I had worked with and known for four years, someone who I thought very highly of — hard working, energetic, loyal — someone who I believed and trusted," O'Dowd said.

O'Dowd said he was directed by Christie in a Dec. 12 conversation at Drumthwacket, the state's gubernatorial mansion in Princeton, to ask Kelly about the bridge incident.

"The governor said something to the effect of: 'Kevin, this bridge issue is still out there. All the noise about politics, political retribution, this is a major distraction. I need you to talk to Bridget Kelly and ask her whether or not she had anything to do with closing the lanes at the bridge," O'Dowd said.

Christie was meeting at Drumthwacket with his former campaign manager and former deputy chief of staff, Bill Stepien, when O'Dowd arrived that day. Stepien – who in January was exiled from Christie's inner circle over a loss of trust related to the bridge incident – attended Monday's hearing, watching most of O'Dowd's testimony from a seat a few rows back with his attorney, Kevin Marino.

O'Dowd spoke with Kelly on both Dec. 12 and 13, and she repeatedly denied any role in the lane closures. It was later learned that Kelly green-lighted the closures with an email to David Wildstein, a Port Authority executive, saying it was "time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee."

O'Dowd continued to trust Kelly, who had told him Dec. 12 she had no emails or text messages that related to the bridge incident, even after she provided two emails related to what happened on Dec. 13, one before and one after Christie's news conference. Kelly also told O'Dowd she sometimes deleted emails, which she wasn't supposed to do.

"I did not believe that she was being dishonest," he said.

The first of those emails was one Kelly received Sept. 12 from an aide, Christina Renna, that outlined concerns raised by Fort Lee's mayor, Mark Sokolich, about the motivation for the lane closures. O'Dowd said he showed the email to Christie, who then told reporters at a news conference a short time later than nobody on his staff had knowledge about the closures being done for political reasons.

"A plain read of this, it seems to be inconsistent. The governor was aware, as I testified to earlier, I handed him that document prior to that press conference," O'Dowd said, who earlier in his testimony noted "that document did not suggest that anyone in the email or Miss Kelly had anything to do with closing the lanes."

O'Dowd's recollections didn't line up with the Gibson Dunn internal investigation in a few areas, including the date of a meeting with press secretary Michael Drewniak that Christie joined, which O'Dowd pegged to Dec. 2, rather than Dec. 5. That's an important distinction, as Drewniak relayed information in that talk he testified that he had first learned from Wildstein in their Dec. 4 dinner.

O'Dowd also revealed that he attended an early October briefing in which chief counsel Charlie McKenna, who has since become head of the Schools Construction Corp., updated Christie on what he had learned from an inquiry with the Port Authority about the lane closures. McKenna is quoted in the internal investigation notes as saying he didn't focus on the issue until November.

"Charlie McKenna told the governor that he had been in contact or had contacted Port Authority officials, I don't recall how he characterized that, had learned that this was a traffic study, however that mistakes had been made, notification mistakes had been made," O'Dowd said. "They had screwed some things up but that this was a legitimate traffic study."